YEAR
1987
INDUCTED BY
Sam Phillips
CATEGORY
Performers
The widely influential pioneer of rockabilly.
Carl Perkins transformed his humble sharecropper roots into jumping, jiving rockabilly hits. His song “Blue Suede Shoes” launched a label and a movement.
Carl Perkins
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Michael Hill
In 1954, Carl Perkins, a country and western singer by trade, was gigging around and doing a local radio show in Jackson, Tennessee, when he heard Elvis Presley’s version of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right.”
Here, for the first time, the major strains in Southern music – hillbilly boogie, country and western, rhythm and blues — came together.
Perkins had been moving in that direction himself, so he headed straight to where Presley was working, Sun Records, in Memphis, and offered his services to owner-producer Sam Phillips.
